[Cisco Cartoon Catalyst Series] Prime Your Network for the Rise of the Devices

It’s a nightmare out there. School districts’ wireless networks now have to support teachers, students, and staff – all touting desktops, tablets, smartphones, and/or laptops. For some in IT, knowing who is accessing what using what on the network (a confusing statement itself) could very well be cosmic chaos; for others, it is simply a black hole of the unknown.

For those IT professionals in the know…life becomes much simpler with Cisco Prime Infrastructure, part of the Cisco BYOD Solutions for K12 Education. Cisco Prime simplifies network management and improves operational efficiency with converged wired and wireless management. Here are a few ways that Prime Infrastructure makes life easier for IT:

Device Management – Teachers, students, and staff with their varied wired or wireless gadgets and corresponding application access makes up a daunting sea of devices for any IT professional, whose responsibility is to provide an optimized network for these very devices. Simple network management becomes a reality with Cisco Prime Infrastructure, which offers a “single pane of glass” view of all wired and wireless devices on the network. Cisco Prime Infrastructure makes network visibility and control effortless for both novice and experienced IT administrators: with just a few clicks, IT has full visibility to sort by user, by device, or by application!

Network Performance – The network’s performance may be impacted by students checking their email, teachers displaying videos in class, and staffers downloading reports all during peak hours of a school day. IT professionals leveraging insight from Cisco Prime Infrastructure can determine which applications are in use, by whom and if the usage levels are impacting the user experience. Additionally, the ability to prioritize teachers’/staffers’ work usage of the network over students’ personal use of the network can ensure teacher’s optimal network performance for education. Keeping the classroom efficient is a key focus of Cisco BYOD Solutions for K12 Education and ensuring a network that performs is always something to celebrate.

IT Simplification – Security threats, troubleshooting, and determining who is accessing what from where on a network can be difficult to manage for an IT staffer.

Imagine a school district, where each student, teacher, and staff has different devices. Now imagine a single dashboard that allowed an IT staffer to manage all devices on the network, know their location, and identify the user level of who is using what from where. Now stop imagining because this is already possible with Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Cisco Prime Infrastructure’s dashboards enable IT staffers to immediately determine choke points across wired and wireless infrastructures, recognize rogue devices on the network to ban access and proactively diagnose and monitor the health of the network.

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